Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation. You can read Dan's recent work here

What happened to the bonfire of the quangos?

Far from getting rid of these unelected agencies, politicians know they are essential props to wielding power (Photo: Alamy)

From Monday's Daily Telegraph

Sally Morgan was a good choice as chair of Ofsted. She is intelligent, sharp, driven and professional. Or at least she was when I first got to know her, which was when she was appointed as one of Tony Blair’s chief fixers. Or as Blair himself described her, one of the “big guns” of his “if necessary we’ll take the world on and screw them all brigade”.

Sally Morgan hasn’t had her term of office renewed, though. And the reason for her dismissal is political. Or it is as far as she is concerned. “I really do think it’s just I am the latest of a fairly long list of people now who are non-Conservative supporters who are not being re-appointed,” she told the Today programme on Saturday.

Well, she’s in an ideal position to know. Because when she was Blair’s director of government relations she had a ring-side seat as New Labour attempted to stuff every quasi-governmental organisation in the land with as many placemen and women it could lay its hands on.

The Blair government’s attitude to the march of the quangos was pretty much the same as its attitude to everything else. First it said it would confront them, then it tried to appropriate them and then it morphed into them.

So in the beginning, we had the pledge of a “bonfire of the quangos”. This was presented as an exercise in fiscal prudence, when it fact it was simply meant to strip away a layer of bureaucracy that was perceived – after almost two decades of uninterrupted Conservative rule – as instinctively and ideologically opposed to Labour and its agenda.

But then Tony Blair won the 1997 election with a majority of 170, and overnight the political landscape changed. Resistance to the New Labour project was now futile, and even the most die-hard Tory quangocrat knew it. Where once they were a threat, now the quangos represented an opportunity. With the right appointments, an entire strata of government could be quickly and easily co-opted to the Blairite project. It presented the chance to extend Downing Street’s patronage. And significant changes to the way government operated could be implemented – the uncharitable might say imposed – well away from the scrutiny of parliament.

The result was that rather than having a bonfire of the quangos, Tony Blair presided over an orgy of them. A Telegraph investigation found that over the first decade of his administration, the number of quangos had soared to more than two and a half thousand, an increase of 41 per cent. The cost of running them had risen to £123.8 billion. And by the time Labour finally left office in 2010, data released by the Commissioner for Public Appointments revealed 77 per cent of quango appointees who declared a political background were Labour supporters, 14 per cent Tories and 4 per cent Lib Dems. When John Major left office in 1997, that figure stood at 57 per cent Conservative, 32 per cent Labour and 5 per cent Lib Dem.

So Sally Morgan has been dumped because of her Labour views – in the same way she and her Downing Street colleagues used to dump their opponents because of their Conservative views. It is the cycle of politics. It is the cycle of life.

But is it really a scandal? An easy narrative always forms around these debates. It goes something like this: Britain is at its best when it is run by those selfless guardians of the national interest, the civil service. The modern political classes have attempted to corrupt them, usurp them and bend them to their will – yes, we’re looking at you Alastair Campbell. This encroachment must be resisted at all costs. Good governance depends upon it.

Does it though? Accusations about “the politicisation” of the civil service are essentially as old as the civil service itself. Margaret Thatcher engaged in open warfare with it for most of the early part of her premiership; or at least until it finally learnt its lesson. Her subjugation of them produced the most radical and dynamic administration in post-war British history. Similarly, whole books have been written about how Tony Blair shredded the civil service rule-book and brought his political apparatchiks into the inner-sanctum of power.

Talk to any minister or special adviser. They will tell you the hardest part of government isn’t the process of taking decisions. It’s ensuring those decisions emerge out of the other end of the civil service machine intact, or at least bearing some passing resemblance to the measure initially sanctioned.

We all remember spending our Sunday evenings laughing at Sir Humphrey’s skilful replacement of hapless minister Jim Hacker’s agenda with his own. But ask anyone who was actually in government at that time and they will tell you: Yes Minister wasn’t a comedy, it was a documentary.

The civil service isn’t politically partisan. But nor is it neutral. In part it is a reflection of its own history, traditions and culture. And it is also, inevitably, a reflection of the administration it has been serving for the past five, 10 or 20 years.

We pride ourselves on the “independence” of our system. But it is a ludicrous system. Every decade or so we change our government, then ask 30 cabinet ministers and 100 special advisers to totally re-align the ship of state, a ship that is crewed by more than 350,000 career civil servants, all of whom have been implementing policies and working to priorities diametrically opposed to that of their new political masters. That’s not a recipe for good governance, that’s a recipe for dysfunctional governance. Which is what we frequently get.

In the United States, each new administration takes total charge of the governmental apparatus from day one for the entirety of its tenure. It doesn’t get it on HP for a few years from the Cabinet secretary.

Quangos, for good or ill, are an integral part of that system. Not every function of government needs to be directly run on a day-to-day basis from Whitehall. Sometimes it is cheaper and more efficient to give these agencies a degree of flexibility and autonomy.

But they are still part of government. And governments are elected to implement change on behalf of the people. At times that change will be difficult and controversial. And anyone who has worked in any organisation knows meaningful change only comes about when those at the top have a shared commitment, vision and ethos for how change should be implemented.

Michael Gove is the democratically elected Secretary of State for Education. If he wants to pick the head of an important agency such as Ofsted, he should do so. If Ofsted doesn’t like it, then Ofsted should simply be abolished and subsumed directly back into the Department of Education. At which point, Michael Gove will assume direct administrative control. Sally Morgan may be a decent Ofsted chair, but she isn’t a member of the government any more, and Michael Gove is.

The problem isn’t that our public institutions are too politicised. It’s that they are the scene of never-ending turf wars between the politicians we elect to manage them and the “independent” civil servants we pay to run them. But at the end of the day, when these battles do occur, it is the politicians who must have primacy. Because they are the ones we ultimately hold to account.

I’m sad that Michael Gove has sacked Sally Morgan. But if we don’t like the job he’s doing, we can vote him out. No one got to vote for Sally.